Campus Rape, a Survivor’s Story

Last week I wrote a column praising Betsy DeVos for announcing that the Department of Education would revisit the Obama administration’s 2011 “guidance” on campus sexual assault. The new guidelines, often interpreted with Procrustean severity by nervous campus administrators, had all but eliminated elementary aspects of due process for the accused.

The results, in far too many cases, were bad verdicts, ruined reputations and permanently damaged lives.

It’s in our moral and constitutional DNA that we take extraordinary pains to safeguard the rights of the accused, even when it means letting the guilty go free. But we also believe in justice, and the fact is that sexual assault is a brutal reality of modern campus life, abetted in too many instances by a culture of binge drinking. How best to change this without compounding one injustice with another, or intruding too far into private life, or violating fundamental rights is a matter of debate. That it has to change isn’t, or shouldn’t be.

After the column’s publication, a young friend wrote me a personal note to share her experience of being raped in college. Her letter is so detailed, devastating, honest and thoughtful that I thought the best thing to do was give her the full stage of an Op-Ed column in The Times.

Here is her letter. She asked that her name be withheld to protect her privacy.

Dear Bret,

I wanted to write you about your Betsy DeVos column. I found it wanting in the way I find many pieces on this subject wanting. I hope you’ll hear me out.

I agree with you that the current system is bad, that the guidance issued by the Obama administration should be reformed, that due process should be safeguarded. I do. In fact, I think the backlash from the bad guidance issued will make things only harder for victims of assault.

And so, that being said, may I suggest a follow-up column? I’ve seen many pieces by sensible people on the violated rights of accused rapists. I have seen zero pieces from the center-right on the rights of sexual-assault victims. I have seen zero pieces that take the problem of sexual assault seriously. The best we get is a glancing line, and then a question about statistics.

But if one took as a given that there was some kind of sexual assault crisis going on at the campuses — even one that resulted in more bad accusations along with real accusations — well, then, can you tell me what should be done about it that doesn’t violate due process and that doesn’t make it harder for the victims to come forward and get a conviction?

If you want to get some perspective on the issue, perhaps you could do more than look at some studies. At least give the victims the same careful attention you give the accused.

I can be your first interview. In college, I once blacked out drunk at a party and someone offered to walk me home. I don’t remember what happened after that, but when I woke up my clothes were on inside out. I started screaming. I didn’t know what had happened, but I did know that some part of me had died forever, and that I had been violated.

It had happened in my empty apartment, late at night, and no one had seen it but us. Both of us had been drinking. I was clearly incapacitated, blacked out, walked home shoeless, had bruises from falling over.

How does one prove I wasn’t passed out at the time of the event itself? We were the only ones there. I couldn’t remember enough from the night to even defend myself. What if I had said O.K.? I didn’t learn till later that incapacitated people can’t consent.

At the time I didn’t know enough about rape laws to know that it wasn’t my fault. And I didn’t think that anyone would believe me even if I had been unconscious when it happened. I had no proof. Not more than 50 percent, anyway. Another girl at my college had reported a rape and had been forced to sit through peer mediation with her rapist. I didn’t want to go through that. I was a strong, tough girl. The prospect of losing a case seemed worse to me than the prospect of sucking it up and moving on.

So I survived. I would wake up sweating from nightmares. I would call up my mom in the middle of the night hysterical and she would stay on the phone with me until I fell back asleep. I lost about 30 pounds. I would gaze into oncoming traffic as I walked to work and think about jumping in.

It took about a year, but I finally got myself to a place where I could talk about what happened to someone who knew better about this sort of thing. And then I wanted justice. But by that time, there was no “preponderance” of evidence to debate. There was no evidence at all.

If the sexual assault crisis on college campuses shouldn’t, and can’t, be addressed by the Department of Education or by changing Title IX, then who can change it and how? I suspect many of the solutions to this crisis are cultural and moral rather than legal, and perhaps there isn’t a clear policy solution. You’re a columnist, and you care about the culture, and it’s well within your purview to examine the moral questions of our time.

It seems to me that conservatives and mainstream liberals have abdicated concern about sexual assault to the far left. It’s an astounding moral blind spot, and frankly it breaks my heart.

In an era where I had to choose between voting for a man who had bragged about sexual assault or a woman who had enabled a husband accused of it, in an era where we can’t even convict Bill Cosby of sexual assault, in an era when a Brock Turner-type gets nothing but a slap on the wrist, the general public still has to be convinced that rape and sexual harassment are real problems. It’s easy to believe there’s an epidemic of false accusations, but not that there’s too much sexual assault. It’s a cognitive dissonance I can’t explain with any charity.

I know in my bones that Brock Turner got convicted only because he assaulted that girl in public. If it had happened like it had happened to me, in an empty house, with no one to see — if there had been no photos — that boy would have walked away with nothing at all. He would have been as unscathed as the one who raped me.

I have helped too many of my friends recover from similar stories to question whether or not this country has a sexual-assault problem. Campuses are a funny focal point, of course. I am sure it is worse for poor women, uneducated women, those outside the bubble of privileged young people at elite institutions. But it still happens on campuses.

I hate having to use my own life as an example. But honestly, so many of the conservative men in my life won’t listen to me on this argument until I tell them my story. So here I am. I was raped. He got away with it, because I didn’t know enough to do everything right and because I was a “bad victim.” I had been drinking. I had no witnesses. There was nothing the law could do for me.

So yes, some boys have been kicked out of college unjustly, or put through a bad system and been traumatized by it. But my rapist walks free. Many others do as well. What can be done for the next girl who wakes up with her clothes inside out and her world ripped apart?